6 Responses to “Arguing with Idiots: Jean-François Lisée”

July 30, 1987
Hungary Seeks Way to Cut High Suicide Rate
By HENRY KAMM, Special to the New York Times

BUDAPEST, July 29— Worried by the highest recorded suicide rate in the world, the Hungarian Government is encouraging an extensive study of its causes to seek ways of prevention.

In the process, the Goverment has gradually lifted the taboo that until the early 1980’s prevented public discussion of the subject.

»Nearly 5,000 persons commit suicide in Hungary in a year, » said Dr. Bela Buda, a psychiatrist who heads a major research project in which several institutes of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences have joined forces. »Perhaps as many as 50,000 try, » Dr. Buda said.

Hungary’s suicide rate is 48 per 100,000 inhabitants. The comparable American figure is said to be 12.

The next highest recorded rates show that in Czechoslovakia, Denmark and Sweden about 25 people out of 100,000 kill themselves. Dr. Buda said that three countries that do not publish suicide data, the European part of the Soviet Union, East Germany and Rumania probably had suicide rates above 30 per 100,000.

Dr. Buda and Laszlo Csehe-Szombathy, director of the Academy’s Institute of Sociology, said in separate interviews that high suicide rates had a history in Hungary provable by statistics going back for more than a century.

»The population has a positive attitude to suicide, » said Dr. Buda. » ‘He was right, he was a brave man,’ many people will say. ‘He didn’t want to face more suffering, so he accepted death heroically.’ »

But Mr. Csehe-Szombathy noted an increase in the last 15 or 20 years. In other high-suicide countries, the specialists said, the rates remain steady. In Hungary, however, it has been climbing since the mid-1960’s.

Both researchers stressed that the rise in suicides had been accompanied by dramatic increases in chronic alcoholism, equally worrying to the Government. The study is concentrating strongly on a suspected causal link between the two social ills. A high percentage of suicide victims were alcoholics.

Radio Free Europe, an American station broadcasting to Hungary, puts the blame for the high suicide rate on the failings of Hungary’s Communist system. This caused the Government in the 1970’s to block the appearance of articles on the subject in newspapers or discussion on the air.

The two specialists said the long history of high suicide rates showed that it was not the coming of Communism in the late 1940’s that was responsible. In fact, Dr. Buda said, the suicide rate was remarkably low in the early 1950’s, when Hungarians were adjusting to the new regime in the Stalinist period.

Rather, the researchers said, this occurred during a far-reaching social transformation that followed the installation of a Communist regime, subsequent liberalization and an economic upswing. In the process, they said, established family and community bonds were weakened or broken.

Dr. Buda and Mr. Csehe-Szombathy said the opening of a »second economy, » in which Hungarians could find extra earnings as more or less private entrepreneurs, has sent many Hungarians on a frantic pursuit of the consumer standards of the West. Only, they said, at Hungarian wages and prices it takes much more work for a person to meet such standards.

»Here it takes seven or eight years of hard work to buy yourself a small apartment, » Dr. Csehe-Szombathy said. Both specialists said overwork was a major cause of alcoholism and family breakups.

The economic stagnation and inflation of the 1980’s has added to the pressures, particularly on the aged living on small pensions, he said. Researchers say they suspect that this is the main reason for the fact that suicide rates rise sharply with age. Dr. Buda said the average suicide victim was more than 60 years old.

Dr. Buda said mental-hygiene centers to help in the detection of suicide candidates have been slow to develop. In the Stalin years the science of psychiatry was condemned as a »bourgeois superstition. »

Dr. Buda said he felt many suicides could have been prevented if there had not been a shortage of trained specialists caused by the years of neglect.